Windows 7 is out and about. Microsoft has been unusually secretive about Vista's successor, but now that PDC is under way, they have unveiled the various enhancements to the user interface. Windows 7 might not have any significant under-the-hood changes (in fact, all your applications and devices will still work), but on the outside, Windows 7 represents the biggest change for the Windows user interface ever since Windows 95 came out.

Yes, by and large NT is a solid kernel, leaps and bounds above Windows 9x.

Still, some very annoying problems with Windows seem to be kernel related.

1) You cannot delete, move or rename a file which some process has open for reading or writing. Even worse, Windows sometimes keeps the file lock after the process has terminated! I can't even start to describe the trouble this creates on a daily basis. On Unix systems, you can delete any file at any time. If a process was reading or even writing the file, it will happily continue to do so. Only when the last file handle is closed, the file system actually reclaims the space used for the content.

2) I have some programs configured to access parts of my disk through network shares. This is necessary because they should also work from other machines. But when my computer is not connected to a network, I cannot access the shares on my own computer! So I have to connect to some random WiFi hotspot or something just to access my localhost. I wish they had heard of loopback devices in Redmond.

Granted, the second problem could be caused by the userland. NT probably does have a loopback device, but it's only up when one of the other network devices is connected.

The first issue most certainly is kernel related, however, and this is by far the worst shortcoming of Windows in my opinion.